“Reprehensible! Debasing! An affront to human dignity!” The outcry has been vociferous and swift in response to the City of Abbotsford’s dump of chicken manure on a popular gathering place for the homeless. While news outlets and blogs have registered the public’s outrage against the city’s tactics, I haven’t seen much analysis asking the deeper question of what lurks underneath the city’s campaign to want to drive away the homeless from their midst in the first place.

Pastor Christoph Reiners of Peace Lutheran Church–who was asked by city officials to stop feeding Abbotsford’s homeless–touches on an answer when he names the discomfort of city officials and citizenry to admit that their idyllic community includes those who are homeless and those who suffer from drug addiction like any other city in North America.

Steve Kimes who pastors Anawim Christian Community, a church of the homeless and mentally ill in Portland, not only names our our discomfort with the poor, especially with those who wear their poverty publicly–such as the homeless or beggars–but digs deeper and proposes that we actually punish the poor for making us feel bad.

The main reason we punish the poor is because–for many of our society [they perceive that] the poor punish them. First of all, the poor make our society look bad, as if our society has done something wrong by having the poor. “Of course,” many think, “our society is well-functioning. So the poor don’t need to be there.” But there they are, the blight on our economic statistics…In our intuitive moral systems….those who make us feel uncomfortable or guilty should be punished for imposing those feelings on us.

For those of us fortunate enough to have the means to feed clothe and house ourselves and our families, we should never forget that…

“None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody bent down and helped us up.

~ Thurgood Marshall

It’s time we stepped down from our perches of privileged power and examined what spiritual dis-ease fuels our thirst for unwarranted retributive justice toward those less fortunate who have little or no power to challenge the injustices we inflict upon them. It’s time we stopped punishing the poor with chicken poop as well as the many other tactics we use against the homeless to rob them of their means of survival.

If you take a poor man’s tent or sleeping bag or coat, even in the name of a government, that poor one will cry out to Me and you shall be homeless and helpless. For what else are they to keep warm in?